What the fuck is immersion? I thought it was enjoying a game so thoroughly that you lose yourself in the experience of playing it, but apparently it's something designers can add like chives to make the game better.
There's two things under consideration here:-
1) What you're talking about, being absorbed and engaged by the gameplay. Call it "gameplay immersion." (GPI)
2) The sense of "immersion" that refers to feeling like you're in and part of the virtual world as depicted/as simulated. Call it "let's pretend immersion." (LPI)
Now obviously there's some crossover. For example many of the RPGs treasured on the Codex have a lot of simulationist intent. So when you're thinking about adding +2 to Dexterity, it's not necessarily just a gameplay thing you do to beat the game or win, you also have a vague image in your mind of the character being a bit more nimble, and that perhaps even being part of their personality (like maybe you picture them fidgeting a bit in conversations).
Few people are without some feeling for
both aspects, but different people weight the two aspects differently, and the same person can weight the aspects differently at different times and with different games.
However, the trick is that LPI is easier to achieve via the shortcut of good art design and graphic realism. You can easily feel like you're "being there" in a game with great graphics that has fairly shitty systems. (Cyberpunk 2077 is a recent case in point - you can cruise through the rain-soaked streets of Night City on your Kusanagi listening to Miles Davis and feel like you're really there and it's ultra cool, and that's a high level of LPI. But if the gameplay is too easy, the C&C vestigial, etc., then you don't get a high level of GPI.) And that shortcut doesn't require too much pondering about the game, it just requires hiring a shit-ton of artists and 3-d modelers (then often firing them once the game is done!
).
I think some of the gripe about immersion here is related to the fact that as the audience for games widened and the possible catchment area of people you could extract money from by making videogames broadened, AAA developers stopped doing highly abstracted games with deep systems, and started chasing the
lowest common denominator of games where the visual representation element (the art design and graphics) is high and can provide a lot of LPI, but the kind of intricate, thoughtful gameplay and simulation you can get with a more abstracted system that provides good GPI was left to more specialized indie developers.
But there are a couple of points here: the very fact LPI immersion via graphic realism is the lowest common denominator means that most of us here
will enjoy it to
some extent too, just not
as much as the blend of GPI and LPI you can get through a mixture of good art design+graphic representation plus an intricate, abstracted system. So there's some bad faith going on here when some people gripe about some games sometimes - they're not being fully honest with themselves or with the audience
Another point is that this means it's not games that have gotten worse, but rather the audience for games has gotten "worse." The worsening of games from the point of view of those of us who prefer the deeper blend of the two elements isn't an artifact of game developers getting worse, but of game developers getting better at servicing the lowest common denominator.
